dell623 writes: "Apple's recent lawsuits against Samsung and HTC are based on patents that are considered trivial and obvious by most people with a working knowledge of software. Apple are not the only company using such patents, but they are doing it blatantly, publicly and dishonestly, and sadly, unlike common patent trolls, they have a unique history of innovation. Such lawsuits can have far reaching consequences. If such patent wars had happened in the last 30-40 years personal computing devices and the internet wouldn't exist as they do today, and similarly, these patent wars threaten to bring about a technological dark age of stagnation or decline, smothering a technological revolution that is still young. We have had an incredible, transformational period of around four decades where powerful computers started off powering expensive military systems and ended up as minuscule devices in our hands that can talk to each other across the world, and we have only begun to explain the possibilities this brings us. These patent wars threaten to brutally strangle a still young revolution that has possibilities we can only begin to imagine."Link to Original Source